Collaboration

by Ruth Perry MD

A few years ago I was involved in the case of David Doe (not his real name), a patient who was referred by the hospital emergency department (ED) to a care management team in a low-income urban community in New Jersey. David was a homeless man who’d been living in an emergency shelter for three years with insulin-dependent diabetes, blindness, and chronically low sodium levels. The team consisted of a nurse case manager, a social worker, and two community health workers. Through the intervention of the social worker, Medicaid was willing to pay for an assisted living to provide him shelter and receive care because he was unable to care for himself due to his blindness.

Because of David’s multiple disorders, his management was complicated and he fell into a cycle of bouncing between the ED and his assisted living facility. During one particularly difficult weekend, David was brought to the ED three times for low sodium. Only after the nurse case manager and I spoke to his treating physicians at the hospital and nursing home were we able to determine the cause of all his ailments and placed him on appropriate medication to treat his low sodium.

While in the assisted living facility, the care management team continued to work with him, arranging an appointment with an ophthalmologist who determined that his blindness was due to cataracts, which were corrected with surgery. With his vision restored and his medical conditions managed, John was able to find stable housing, was linked to primary care, and is currently living independently.

He had no further ED visits.

Here is an extraordinary case where the application of team-based chronic care management (CCM) was able not just to help a patient get healthy, but to take control of his life again. Additionally, David’s story also highlights the importance of the social determinants of health in overall health and wellbeing This case also highlights the importance of the social determinants of health and in particular, the importance of housing. In many cases, housing is medicine.

This is not an isolated incident; countless others have had their lives restored by using a team-based approach to look critically at the source of a patient’s ailments, instead of seeing only the symptoms.

Overview

In the Green Industrial Revolution Woodrow Clark and Grant Cooke describe the environmental, social, economic, and political forces and some of the critical technologies that are driving a third global industrial transformation. These technologies will shape the direction of Planet Earth in the 21st century. In an earlier book, Partners in Prosperity—Strategic Industries for the U.S. and Japan (McGraw Hill, 1985) I documented how at specific historical times and places certain economically “strategic” technologies and industries served as catalysts to accelerate innovation, raise productivity, and stimulate economic growth, and produce new and more creative jobs. The Green Industrial Revolution is constellating, with compounding impact, breakthroughs in science and technology that have the potential to support a new era of global prosperity.

One intersection between The Green Industrial Revolution and my present work is the question of how to raise global literacy and consciousness about the Green Industrial Revolution? Another is how to build a corps of millions of green innovators and entrepreneurs who can imaginatively solve global problems collaboratively? A Smart Explorers Wheel introduced in my 2013 book Piloting Through Chaos—The Explorer’s Mind offers one useful approach. In fact, the convergence of advanced Information Communications Technologies through this new learning-problem-solving platform will introduce an additional strategic capability that can accelerate breakthroughs in the Green Industrial Revolution. Throughout history many other strategic industries in their time, for example, displayed a similar converge with communications technologies. The canals and railroads in 18th and 19th century America and Japan’s post WWII “Trigger Industries” (semiconductor-computer-telecommunications-robotics) are good examples.

The Future Embedded in the Present

The Smart Explorers Wheel Platform is best viewed from several perspectives. As depicted on the home page of the Explorers Wheel website the Wheel gathers and integrates the creative energy of an Explorers Community around a central theme or inventive challenge. In the present example the focal theme could be measurably and rapidly to enable millions of people around the world almost overnight to achieve literacy about regarding all the critical challenges, issues, and available resources for the Green Industrial Revolution. The center of the Wheel– the “Explorers Mind”–is surrounded by eight realms or prisms. They are the entry points for the Explorer’s Journey. The realms are: the Past, Wisdom, Beauty, Life Force, Discovery-Invention-Innovation, Humanity, the Networked Brain, and the Future. The explorer enters within any realm that most strikes her or his fancy. As the Wheel begins to spin the explorer starts to discover interesting “intertidal” connections between the various realms. The “intertidal” is derived from the zone of greatest biological fertility where the ocean’s tides flow in and out.

In my work globally (see short bio below) over the last four decades, I have discovered this same liminal zone at the border of consciousness and the unconscious processes, where the barriers between conventional disciplines and fields collapse. This is also a fertile terrain of the human mind, where new perspectives, discoveries, and inventions can suddenly appear. The Explorers Wheel helps to train the Explorer’s Mind through the iterative process of consciously and continuously discovering often surprising connections.

Recent scientific discoveries suggest that this explorers’ process of finding connections may itself actually generate new neuropathways. The human brain is an extraordinary neuroplastic organ, and its potential for systematic applications to the frontier of a Green Industrial Revolution is virgin territory. The logical implication is that each member of a GIR Explorers Community, and the Explorers Community as a whole, will become smarter, more creative, resourceful, and resilient. At least this seems a plausible hypothesis. It invites rigorous scientific confirmation.

Today’s Applications of the Explorers’ Wheel

I believe the most important discoveries and inventions in the Green Industrial Revolution will be generated by systematically and collaboratively harvesting the intertidal connections between narrowly siloed conventional fields and academic disciplines. A particularly important application of this principle will be to accelerate breakthroughs at “choke points” between important areas of concern—for example, food security, clean water, and sustainable energy—in order to ensure that the solutions in one domain do not create secondary negative consequences in another.

For example, if not approached systemically a breakthrough in food security could result in wasting huge amounts of available fresh water; a breakthrough in desalination could result in pollution of coastal waters and the consumption of huge amounts of energy. The Explorers Wheel encourages systemic thinking and systemic solutions. As the explorer ventures more deeply, he or she may reach an interesting frontier of discovery: the realms are sufficiently broad while bounded that they provide an effective framework and process to connect every issue of importance in the Green Industrial Revolution with every other.

The other important dimension of the Explorers Wheel platform is that it is “smart”. In other words, it learns 24/7 along with and about its community of explorers. Story telling is the engine of an Explorers Wheel. The Explorers Wheel platform harvests these stories along with the embedded metaphors, images, and idiosyncratic ways of thinking of the millions of members of GIR-Smart Collaborative Innovation Network (GIR-SCOIN). The more actively engaged the members, the smarter the GIR-SCOIN becomes. The result is a new kind of “psychographic data base” which can be licensed as a valuable asset to Charter Sponsors who share the vision and values of the GIR. The Explorers Wheel in this way offers a powerful means to contribute to the financial sustainability of GIR-SCOIN.

The GIR-SCOIN platform is designed to incorporate additional elements. Virtually all of these elements are already developed, tested, and proven and await integration. They include:

New processes for discovery and invention engineering and collaborative innovation embodied in a Discovery/Invention/Innovation Engine which can accelerate breakthroughs for humanity virtually on demand.

A collaborative IP model to facilitate collaboration including advanced processes and frameworks for the negotiation, structuring, management, measurement, and conflict resolution of strategic alliances and networks.

A new model of Artful Negotiation based on the principle of integrity.

A Translation Engine which enables domain experts and creative amateurs (“citizen scientists”) to communicate and work effectively together.

A Trust Engine which enables recipients to assess the degree of reliability of the data they are receiving.

A Collaborative Competition platform that will support X-Prize-like competitions for breakthroughs for humanity.

Advanced Smart Search components so that the platform learns about each participant and supports his/her discovery process.

A Wisdom Expert System which enables users to encode the “wisdom genome” of the great figures of history living and dead across all fields and turn them into mentors for our daily lives.

A way of integrating Big Data, Big Mechanism, and Big Heart (described below) with particular interest in humanitarian applications.

A new approach to online learning.

Within three years or less the Explorers Wheel Platform can become the online Brain of the Green Industrial Revolution.

A Post Green Industrial Revolution for the 21st Century: The Alignment and Integration of Heart, Mind, and Hand.

The Green Industrial Revolution will catalyze breakthroughs in science and technology that hold the promise, at least in theory, to usher in an unprecedented era of global abundance and prosperity. However, my observations over the past fifty years raise one profound concern: I do not believe that technology alone divorced from an expanded consciousness will achieve this result. According to visionaries like Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) and Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind) within the next 30-50 years the Human Brain and its artifact, the Mind, will merge with computers, conferring countless benefits on suffering humanity, including a form of bionic and digital immortality. I do not accept the reductionist proposition that all we dream and are can be reduced to bits and bytes governed by the implacable force of Moore’s Law.

In fact, the deep problems of human hatred, greed, arrogance, cruelty, and selfishness will remain; and even worse, the new green technologies with all their promise may well, if not tempered by the angels of our better nature—generosity, kindness, and unconditional love—can easily be turned to devilish purpose. Today the world must deal with the “Devil’s Equation”: nuclear arms + hatred + time acceleration> attention deficit= Apocalypse. Is this not the present challenge presented by despotic regimes like ISIS and North Korea?

The critical question then is how most effectively to release the Promethean power of Mind but temper and guide it by the wisdom, foresight, balance, resilience, and generosity of the Heart? Will not all the scientific and technological wonders humanity has thus far produced pale in comparison when, after so many millennia, we can discover a way to reconcile and harness the power of Mind and Heart together? In my view the Green Industrial Revolution, which is still in its infancy, is ideally suited to build a foundation for what may prove the 4th Great Advance in Human Evolution: the Alignment and Integration of Heart, Mind, and Hand.

Smart Explorers Wheels: Next Steps

Currently our team is well along in designing and planning the launch of several pilot Smart Explorers Wheels during the next twenty-four months. Some applications most relevant to the Green Industrial Revolution include:

Smart Creative Sustainable Cities

Accelerating breakthroughs at the chokepoints of clean water, food security, and sustainable energy

Consider one application in particular which is rapidly being implemented (2014-2015) – A Smart Platform for a new U.S.-China Trade and Innovation Center. This will become the preeminent action-oriented think tank of its kind in the world focusing on food security, clean tech, water, sustainable energy, investment liberalization, trade facilitation, and e-commerce.

This platform will include a breakthrough in instantaneous voice recognitionin English/Chinese available via SKYPE and smart phones that will enable millions of green innovators and entrepreneurs inside and outside China to collaborative effectively together. With adequate financing and the effective collaboration of the major companies that have already developed the core technical components the app can be delivered to market within the next 18 months (mid-2015).

Summary: Not the End and More Than a Beginning

A Smart Explorers Wheel can contribute significantly to the realization of the goals of the Global Industrial Revolution in the following ways:

It will provide a platform to raise global literacy and consciousness by integrating the next generation tools, methods, and resources of social media, smart search, crowd intelligence, Big Data and Big Mechanism in a new model of online learning and education.

It will help to accelerate breakthrough discoveries, inventions, and innovations by providing a collaborative platform for technology developers, users, financiers, and many others who will play a critical role in delivering effective innovations to the market place.

In time it will combine instantaneous voice recognition technology which will dismantle the language and cultural barriers between nations, and ultimately change forever the master-slave relationship between humans and machines.

It will provide a crucible for Heart to play a crucially needed role in People-to-People (Heart-to-Heart) Exchanges both online and in the outside world.

It offers a new revenue model deriving from license fees based on a continuously enhanced psychographic data, generated by the story telling of members of the GIR-SCOIN.

As Woodrow Clark and Grant Cooke ably document, the Green Industrial Revolution is already upon us. Millions of global citizens from every nation and culture are exuberant to engage in this new age of green exploration and innovation. When Heart becomes the source code of this Revolution, a Great Next Transformation will occur, for it must as the hourglass of our suffering planet to change course is rapidly running out.

Julian Gresser, Chairman, Alliances for Discovery is an international attorney, inventor, social entrepreneur, and professional negotiator. He was twice Mitsubishi Visiting Professor at the Harvard Law School and has been a visiting professor at MIT, Beijing University, and Doshisha University in Kyoto Japan. He has served as a senior advisor to the U.S. State Department, the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, the European Commission (where he coached its Japanese negotiating teams), and the World Bank. During the past 25 years he has trained hundreds of senior executives around the world in his integrity-based system of Artful Negotiation, described in his recent book Piloting Through Chaos—The Explorer’s Mind(Bridge 21Publications, August 2013). Julian Gresser is the author of Environmental Law in Japan(MIT Press, 1981), Partners in Prosperity—Strategic Industries for the U.S. and Japan (McGraw Hill 1985) among other works. He is deeply involved in developing a global response to the unfolding tragedy from the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan. (www.explorerswheel.com). One of his most exciting current ventures is to establish a unique action-oriented 21st century think tank the U.S.-China Center on Trade and Innovation.

Julian Gresser, MA, JD, Woodrow W.Clark II, MA3, PhD., and Francisco Acuna, MPA MBA, JD
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Green technologies are beneficially transforming every aspect of life on Planet Earth in the 21st century. Partners in Prosperity—Strategic Industries for the U.S. and Japan documented how in specific historical times and places certain economically “strategic” technologies and industries served as catalysts to accelerate innovation, raise productivity, stimulate economic growth, and produce jobs. Japan’s global industrial growth in the 1970s and 1980s proved the point in automobiles, household electronics, semiconductors, computers, and robotics. The Green Industrial Revolution describes how “social capital” is being created in the Nordic countries and China through the rapid diffusion of green innovations and technologies originating in the energy and environmental sectors to all areas of society.

People tend to think of green innovation as a matter of systems integration implemented by experts on a technical level. One example is “agile energy systems” that combine power generation, distribution, storage along with the transmission of renewable energy sources at both the central grid and locally on-site or distributed power to communities. Such agile systems are often linked with transportation infrastructure networks based largely on sustainable fuels. But technical solutions, no matter how innovative will not ensure local community engagement, support, and adoption.
An expanded definition of “sustainability” is emerging that explicitly includes human wellbeing, eco-services of natural assets, resilience of material systems, integrity of institutions, and community knowledge. A new conception of “capital” is also replacing outdated notions of energy and materials utilization that have focused to date on slowing rates of consumption. The real challenge for advanced and developing economies alike is to find a way to engage local communities creatively in the design and implementation of these green and now “smart” systems, so that the resulting prosperity is more widely and equitably shared.

A major success story is unfolding in Mexico which possesses a vast treasure of untapped solar, wind, geothermal, biofuel, and ocean wave energy resources. During the past several years a consortium has been formed by InTrust in cooperation with Harvard’s Center for Global Health and the Environment. It includes 300 professors from 120 universities who are training young entrepreneurs to work together on 100 high priority projects with support from Mexico’s Ministry of Energy. The consortium is precedent-setting in that local communities, including many rural and indigenous peoples, are themselves owners of the green energy projects, rather than being the passive observers of “artificial bubbles” of economic development happening on their incredibly rich lands.

Yet a central challenge remains: how most effectively to promote a creative dialogue among all stakeholders that will catalyze new discoveries, inventions, and innovations? As in advanced industrialized economies Mexico is searching for a new collaborative architecture that can capture the benefits of green innovation, while financially rewarding cooperation through recognizing mega-patents, patent pools, and other legal innovations. Creating incentives for international smart green technology transfers to Mexico is also critical, especially through alternatives that replace the old colonial model of foreign ownership of natural resources in exchange for patronage.

One useful tool that can help Mexico meet these challenges is a “Smart Green Explorers Wheel”. The Wheel introduces a new way of connecting diverse domains of knowledge and people that are currently fragmented in vertical silos as a result of increasing professional specialization. The process begins by the explorers posing a central innovation challenge at the hub which they then investigate from eight perspectives: the Past, Wisdom, Beauty, Life Force, Innovation, Humanity, the Networked Brain, and the Future. This way of exploring trains the mind to perceive the world differently and to discover its deeper patterns. Important breakthroughs can often be found at the “intertidal” connections among conventional fields which reflect the eight realms. The Explorers Wheel can be designed as an online intelligent aide, which continuously learns along with the participants and provides useful feedback on their core innovation challenges.

A Smart Green Explorers Wheel can help provide the connective tissue for Mexico’s green innovation initiative. How might it work? A Visual Matching Engine will first identify and display the optimal linkages of people, places, and resources for each high priority project. The resulting team and supporting network would then formulate the core innovation challenge. The challenge serves as the integrating focal point. An example: how can the available wind and solar energy in this location be optimally harvested to generate significant revenues for the community as whole as well as the developers and financiers? Through the Wheel participants gain access to the leading collaborative invention methodologies they can directly apply to solving the challenge. Together they then design and implement a plan to commercialize the resulting IP portfolio. The Wheel will also provide a venue for the stakeholders to record their personal stories– their dreams and struggles, victories and defeats, and the lessons drawn from the expedition. The resulting “visionary community narrative” will provide coherence and build momentum. By being showcased on the Wheel the local wind/solar project will attract foreign sources of capital, talent, and new technologies which will benefit the overall program.

For the Green Industrial Revolution to succeed it must become a force of convergence for a broad segment of society. Although strategic technologies and industries have historically been the engines of accelerated economic growth, the vitality and exuberance of local communities have always been its heart, brains, and fire. By engaging people around purposeful, vitalizing, and compassionate activities a Smart Green Explorers Wheel may provide one essential resource in a world that is increasingly isolated, lonely, suspicious, and despairing of viable alternatives.
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Julian Gresser, Chairman, Alliances for Discovery, Woodrow W. Clark II, Managing Director, Clark Strategic Partners; Francisco Acuna, CEO InTrust Global Investments, LLC